Читать книгу Meet Me on the Barricades - Charles Yale Harrison - Страница 5

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Mrs. Mathilda Simpson was a large, placid woman who moved on the two-dimensional level of pragmatic reality and whose imagination operated almost exclusively within the narrow limits of her household and social duties.

The tenor of her existence would have been completely unruffled but for the psychological eccentricities of her husband. One never quite knew when Herbert was likely to give expression to views on philosophical anarchism, socialism in one country, permanent revolution, separate establishments for husbands and wives, or compulsory Wassermann tests for all. And in mixed company at that! This was particularly reprehensible in the circles in which the Simpsons moved where solidity was a virtue and imagination, unless commercially exploited, was somehow disturbing.

When he was silent, however, matters were still worse. For then he sat with a far-away expression on his face, nursing a smile.

The Simpsons were childless (a fact for which Mathilda nobly took all responsibility) and their evenings, when Herbert was not performing, were spent at cards, visiting, and other mild forms of suburban recreation. At the moment Mrs. Simpson was sitting in the dining-room of their Mount Vernon home bitterly reconciled to the fact that the dinner was almost dried to a crisp. Moreover, the Faulkners were coming over to play bridge at eight and it was nearly half-past seven now. Just as she was about to eat alone Simpson entered the hall, white and haggard.

As the charred chops were served Mathilda said:

“You’d better hurry, Herbert dear, we expect company in a little while. Bridge tonight.”

The Insurgent artillery still thundered in Simpson’s ears. Scenes of carnage and destruction lay before his eyes.

“The world’s in flames and people play bridge,” he said.

“What is it now?” Mrs. Simpson asked in alarm.

“Spain.”

“Oh!” [Relieved.]

“Well, I’m not going to play bridge tonight.”

Mrs. Simpson looked at her husband out of determined but understanding eyes and remarked that it was all right, she would get another hand. She hadn’t counted on his playing anyway. Then:

“Very well, dear, but hurry; they’ll be here at any moment.”

The discussion was ended. And so it was always; the Simpsons never argued. Nevertheless a shrewd observer would have noticed that a matriarchal peace reigned over their relationship.

Shortly after they were married they had had one serious difference of opinion during which Herbert found himself face to face with a bland imperturbability of cosmic proportions. Although Herbert imagined that he dwelt in a matrimonial democracy, in reality he lived in a state perilously close to domestic totalitarianism. If there was no obvious repression it was only because there was no open rebellion.

Mathilda looked on as he ate, observed his tense nostrils, his pallor.

“You don’t look well, Herbert.” Then shrewdly: “You didn’t get into another political argument today, did you?”

“No. I’m all right.”

Herbert’s political convictions, if such they may be called, were greatly confusing to Mathilda. Before they were married he had indulged in a formless sort of humanitarianism to which she had paid little attention, and which she had hoped would soon pass. It did. But not before it had been replaced by a newer and a more unorthodox credo.

Simpson now openly declared himself to be a philosophical anarchist. This didn’t seem to make sense. Anarchists were bomb-throwers, people who believed in and practiced free love. More, they openly discussed the most intimate aspects of birth control. The very word brought to mind names like Emma Goldman, who always seemed to be in difficulties with the police, or Alexander Berkman, who had attempted to assassinate that steel man (what’s his name?), and hirsute and irresponsible people generally.

And why a philosophical anarchist? Philosophy meant abstract and incomprehensible thought; the intrinsic nature and essence of reality, subjective idealism leading to solipsism—stuff like that which she had read somewhere in an idle moment, silly but harmless. Or when one thought of a philosopher it was some noble person (in marble) like Plato, Aristotle or those other ancient Greeks, not wild-eyed, contemporary foreigners on Fourteenth Street. He had put the word in, she felt, merely to confuse her.

Now Herbert was none of these things; he was neither philosophical in the sense of subjective idealism leading to solipsism, nor was he a bomb-thrower. As for free love ...

In the fall of 1918, a year after the Russian Revolution, when all of America was intensely patriotic and overflowing with the vitriol of inspired human hatred, Herbert took it into his head to become a communist. As time passed he modified his stand somewhat and declared himself to be a democratic communist and went on to explain this apparent contradiction in terms:

“The sort of thing they have in Russia may sound brutal to us but it’s all right for the Russians. They’re an ignorant people; centuries of Czarism did it. Besides, there’s a peculiar thing called the Russian soul. You read about it in Dostoyevsky. It’s murderous and soft-hearted, heroic and cowardly, backward and revolutionary, all at the same time. Why, take a Russian mouzhik—that means farmer—he can talk philosophy by the hour and then go out and brain his wife with an ax. At the same time they have great music. Take Rimsky-Korsakov or Moussorgsky, for example. All this comes from the Russian soul. But in America things are different. When we have a revolution here it will have to take on a democratic form. In the United States communism will have to be a combination of the best of Russian and American systems. That’s why I call myself a democratic communist.”

All this sounded like moonshine to Mathilda. Nevertheless she was rather proud of Herbert for having mastered such reverberating, thundering phraseology. She said nothing and hoped for the best.

For more than a decade Simpson remained a faithful communist sympathizer—with minor reservations, of course, but a devout fellow-traveler nevertheless. He subscribed to radical magazines, contributed generously to defense funds and followed the zigzags of the international revolutionary movement with great intensity, if not clarity.

In 1928, when Stalin announced the imminent downfall of capitalism in his then celebrated but now forgotten Theory of the Third Period, Simpson waited with some impatience for the appearance of barricades in the sleepy, tree-lined streets of Mount Vernon. Once, after a heated political debate with Faulkner, he drew himself up to his full height and declared:

“Very well, then, nothing remains to be said. Meet me on the barricades!”

When Hitler came to power and when the Kremlin’s international policies began to savor more and more of conservatism, Simpson’s faith in the Stalinist leadership began to wane. Then the leaders of the 1917 revolution fell before the G.P.U. firing squads. Stunned and bewildered he now found himself, for a time, without a political resting-place.

But Simpson was an incurable revolutionary sympathizer. His dream-world turned upon the axis of revolutionism. For what mental fiction can be more satisfying than one which holds forth the promise to destroy old concepts, to create new social forms and which is at once the life and the resurrection?

Once more Simpson changed his political line. Stalin, he said, was pursuing a counter-revolutionary course. At the same time, however, he still believed the Soviet Union to be a workers’ state which was unfortunately saddled with a voracious, dictatorial bureaucracy. If only this bureaucracy could be induced to resign, or at least to mend its ways! Sadly, he came to the conclusion that bureaucracies never resign and so, one bright morning, he boldly announced that while he still considered himself a staunch defender of the Soviet Union and while he approved of many of the Stalinist principles and policies, from now on he was a free lance communist.

It was at this point that Mathilda gave up in despair. However, she consoled herself with the thought that some men were women-chasers, others drunkards and gamblers and that, after all, vicarious revolution, however absurd it seemed, could not quite come under the heading of vice. She cared for his health, managed his affairs, ministered to his simple wants, listened to his varying theories and thanked God it wasn’t worse.

Each change in Herbert’s political line, naturally enough, brought about a corresponding change in his reading habits. Before the war it was Kropotkin, Haywood and Bakunin; after the Russian Revolution it was Lenin and Trotsky (no one in those days had ever heard of Stalin) and so on. Incapable of sustained theoretical reading, he preferred books dealing with the more personal aspects of revolution: My Flight from Siberia, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, Bill Haywood’s Book. The appearance of a radical novel was an event in his life.

All the pictures he had ever seen, all the books, stories and articles he had ever read, all the radio talks he had ever heard, formed a palimpsest of memory which lent substance and color to his daydreams. A word, a familiar sight, a bar of music, an odor, was enough to set him off.

They had been sitting in silence for some time, finally Mathilda said:

“You don’t look well, Herbert, dear. Are you worried about something?”

“I read of another fascist air-raid today. Not a house left standing. Men, women and kids killed in the streets....”

“But what can we do about it? I guess we ought to be glad we’re Americans.”

Mathilda’s apathy simply served to increase the intensity of his emotions.

“Well, if I were ten years younger, I’d volunteer for service with the Loyalists.”

“What a thing to say!”

Setting his cup down with determination:

“I certainly would.”

“I like that! You’d leave me to go away and get killed just because of a crazy political idea. You know perfectly well that you’ve changed your ideas before. How do you know you’re not going to change again? [In anger.] If you want to get rid of me, Herbert Simpson, there are simpler ways of doing it. [With contempt.] And how far do you think you would get with your weak heart? [Gently, as she sees she has wounded him.] Herbert, you are romantic!”

He said nothing in reply; there was nothing to be said.

The doorbell rang. The Faulkners and a friend had arrived. There were noisy, shrill greetings, small talk. The card table was taken out of the cupboard. Simpson felt out of place, excused himself, went upstairs to their bedroom to read.

He undressed, got into his pajamas and dressing-gown and settled down for an evening with an exceedingly modern novel. After reading for a few minutes he put the book down. He was in no mood for unusual syntax, it corresponded too closely with the unevenness of his intellectual existence.

Sounds of laughter came from the floor below. Faulkner’s booming, positive voice annoyed him particularly.

“Six hearts!” he heard him call out.

—The world going to hell and these fools playing cards! And Mathilda thinking I wanted to go to Spain for some personal reason....

He closed his eyes, passed a tired hand over his lids and in that moment he became aware that Natasha was in the room.